of the gods, obviously borrowed from Raphael's "Marriage of
Cupid and Psyche" in the Farnesina at Rome. The fusion of Roman
composition with Lombard execution constitutes the chief charm of this
singular work, and makes it, so far as I am aware, unique. Single
figures of the Goddesses, and the whole movement of the scene upon
Olympus, are transcribed without attempt at concealment. And yet the
fresco is not a bare-faced copy. The manner of feeling and of execution
is quite different from that of Raphael's school. The poetry and
sentiment are genuinely Lombard. None of Raphael's pupils could have
carried out his design with a delicacy of emotion and a technical skill
in coloring so consummate. What, we think, as we gaze upward, would the
master have given for such a craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and
animal crudity of the Roman school are absent; so also is their vigor.
But where the grace of form and color is so soft and sweet, where the
high-bred calm of good company is so sympathetically rendered, where
the atmosphere of amorous languor and of melody is so artistically
diffused, we cannot miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours
de force_ of Giulio Romano. The scala of tone is silvery golden. There
are no hard blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow
lights, the morning hues of primrose or of palest amber, pervade the
whole society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though
this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something
ravishing in those yellow-haired, white-limbed, blooming deities. No
movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of the
senses, as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their music;
nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter and
communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine calm. The
white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together like stars seen in
the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half smothered in snow-drops,
and among them Diana, with the crescent on her forehead, is the fairest.
Her dream-like beauty need fear no comparison with the Diana of the
Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their
bloom of earliest manhood; honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues
of living electron; realizing Simaetha's picture of her lover and his
friend:

+tois d' en xanthotera men helichrysoio geneias,
stethea de stilbonta poly pl